Racing Drones With UAV Advocate Raphael Pirker

(Source: http://gigaom.com)  

There is a zen moment when you are flying a drone in the first-person perspective when the ground drops away and the camera stabilizes. There is a horizon in every direction, and the only question left is, “Which way do you want to fly?”

“It’s the ability to be in the pilot’s seat without the danger of actually being in the pilot’s seat,” said Raphael “Trappy” Pirker, the entrepreneur and enthusiast behind the Team BlackSheep drone shop and community. “You can travel places, you can see stuff from a different perspective. It’s kind of a mix of outdoor adventure and technology.”

Pirker, who develops and sells drones from Hong Kong, travels the world shooting familiar sites from new perspectives. You may have come across his closeup view of a fireworks display or flight around the Statue of Liberty. Team BlackSheep’s videos are daring — close passes over the highest point of the Golden Gate Bridge, long shots of dense city streets and breathtaking vertical pans of skyscrapers.

t’s one part activism and one part obsession. Team BlackSheep has flown over mountains in Pirker’s native Switzerland and Austria. They have flown in cities where crashing a drone will land you in jail. The team’s first video of New York carries both a warning and a challenge: Don’t try this at home, but ‘Hey, look we safely shot this video and didn’t get arrested.’

In the end, it wasn’t a daredevil flight that landed Pirker in trouble. A promotional video he shot for the University of Virginia in 2011 earned him a $10,000 fine from the Federal Aviation Administration asserting he flew recklessly and without a license.

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